"That's pretty wild man. How did you get the flange effect so pronounced?"

It's actually not a Flange but it's very close, as they are both
in the short delay effect family - it's the Pulveriser Comb Filter.
That being said, what I am feeding into it has a lot to do with how
pronounced the effect is. I As I mentioned above I am using a custom
Pulsar based synth. It consists of two Pulsar's as oscillators
(2 x 2LFO's = 4Osc's), another Pulsar as a modulator + an RV7000,
Comp-01 (Compressor), D11 (Foldback Dist), PEQ (EQ - this is modulated
for the filter'ish sweep effect) and the UN16 (Unison). The waveform
choice for the LFO's that are the OSC's + usage of the Shuffle and Phase
setting + the Unison + the Pulveriser's Comb filter come together to create
the sound you are referring to. It can actually get much much meaner if I
throw and Audiomatic right before the Pulveriser and use the Psych or Wash preset.

This is because it's 100% improvised. What I tend to do a lot is come up
with synth patches (I probably made 100 Pulsar synth patches before coming
up with one that sounded as good as the one in this track) and then hit
record and screw around with either my Livid Base or my PadKONTROL. I set
them up so that all the pads are in a specific key/scale and just go to
town playing whatever. Typically I will play for 30min to an hour and then
go back and slice up the stuff I like, typically into 2 or 4 bar Rex loops.
Once I have a decent set of samples I then start setting them up to be
played with drums on my PadKONTROL's . You can check out what I mean here:

But for this track I pretty much took a good 7+ minute chunk of what I
played, cleaned it up a little and used it. However, I didn't just use
it straight up. I took the resulting Midi from playing and recorded 3 times
to additional tracks, each time doing different tweaks on the combinator
front panel knobs. The made for 4 tracks (counting the original one) of
playing that is identical note wise but different sound wise. I then
sliced out parts of the different tracks so that typically 2 to 3 tracks
are audible at the same time, but never all the synth tracks at once.

"This track held my attention, that's for sure. Always something new
happening. I think the kick sounds rad but has too much compression
squeezing the transient like it's folding onto itself. But it's a righteous
beat. Did you write it? Loop? Sounds like Alt Drums to me."

The drums are a custom Kong kit that I cobbled together from various
sources. One source is definitely the Kong Bullet kit since the name I
gave it is BulletTrain. I don't know when the snare came from (but I
should) and the Kick is a resampled hybrid of the two kicks in the Kong
Bullet Kit. As for the beat - I played along with the song and was able
to do the whole thing in a single take (which is not always the case). I
had goosebumps as I was recording the drum part. It was awesome to hear the
whole thing come together. As for the kick - yeah the compression level
is very apparent when the synth parts sorta fade during that end sequence.
I considered changing it but I felt that would take away from the 1 take real
timeness of it and I started really digging the way the end sounds and
think the sound of the kick is a big factor in that.

Thanks for the feedback - especially the stuff you wrote in the songs
timeline. I really appreciate it. I am going to check out some of your stuff now.

Oh if you're interested in checking out my Pulsar Synth here's a link to the Combinator Patch:

I finally got around to providing a link to the OSX packages that I generated
for Massh & Ambit about a year ago for my friend
Felipe.
Failing to be Johnny-On-The-Spot for stuff that ALREADY EXISTS and therefore
required almost no effort to provide is obviously LAME. Srsly, I got no
excuse and wouldn't put up with one from anyone else, so....

In other news: I've had Massh & Ambit updates in the can for months but sadly
never find the time to do an actual release (Freshmeat, Sourceforge updates,
announcements, packages, documentation, writeups, new features & some douchy
bragging). I've had new ideas for Massh, Ambit & a bunch of stuff that I keep
putting off releasing for a while as well. Hopefully soon I will get some of
it out there. As for those that have sent requests, made suggestions and
pointed out bugs, I have not forgotten about any of you and will be sure to
either incorporate your *stuff* or (at very least explain) why your *stuff*
wasn't incorporated.

Complete Rewrite

Cleaner, More Efficient, Faster, More Modular

Divorced From Ambit

Ambit was always going to become general purpose tool and not beholden to
Massh, regardless of the fact that Ambit wouldn't exist without Massh's dire
need for it. Massh no longer cares what supplies it with an enumerated list of
hosts. Additionally Massh has an option for specifying what (if not Ambit)
will enumerate hosts. In the near future both
NIS NetGroups
and
Genders
Host Ranges will be tested and supported.

Simplified CLI

Pull Functionality

Pull the same file from hundreds of hosts in seconds - each file gets stored
in hostname derived directories.

Script Push and Run Is Now ScriptPushAndRun

No longer is this a two (sometimes three) step process for each host (push,
then run, then cleanup). Massh'ed scripts are now piped over the single (per
host) SSH connection for execution, but never stored on the remote host.

Short Commands

Connection Persistence

If Massh is run in combination with OpenSSH >5.6 it will adhere to the
following options if set : ControlMaster ControlPath ControlPersist. When
these options are set Massh is able to achieve sub-second results to hundreds
of hosts (results will vary - how cheesy does that sound?).

Multi-line Output Separator

Massh continues to stand apart when it comes to perfectly sequenced, grouped,
multi-line output by adding an option for clear separation between each host's
output.

Configurable Default Behavior

The SubCommand option provides the ability to lock in Massh's default behavior
(verbose [full output], push, execute [script], etc.). It's also another way
to further simplify/shorten Massh commands.

Now 100% More Man

Massh now comes with a man page in addition to the default help txt (massh
[ help | -h | --help ]) and the documentation that is being continually
updated here on this site.

Complete Rewrite

Cleaner, More Efficient, Faster, More Modular.

Network HostGroups

In addition to Ambit being able to reference User Specific and System Level
HostGroups it can now enumerate hosts that are defined, presented and
referenced on/over the network. Ambit's 'Domain' option allows for the
specifying a DNS domain that Ambit will query for DNS TXT records that
contain Fully Qualified Domain Names or Ambit expandable strings. The choice
of TXT records in DNS was initially trivial. Now that choice has proven to be
a very fortuitous (hosts and host groupings are manged in the same place - TXT
records are very flexible).

Divorced From Massh

Ambit began life as a purpose-built hostname enumerator and host string
expander for Massh.

Command Expansion plus Execution

If Ambit is passed a command it will attempt to expand it in the same manner
that it expands 'host strings', run each iteration of the expanded command,
one at a time (think 'for loop'). Command Expansion and Execution augments
Bash Brace Expansion by being able to both expand and execute commands that
Brace Expansion often can't.

HostGroup Location plus Format Changes

System HostGroups now default to /var/ambit/hosts - User HostGroups default
to $HOME/.ambit/hosts. HostGroup files are no longer prefixed with 'hosts'.
HostGroup files need to have the first three lines formatted in a specific
way in order to show up in Ambit's HostGroup listings.

Colon's No Longer Concatenate Multiple HostGroups

In the past colons were used to combine more than one HostGroup on the command
line with the result being Ambit output consisting of all hosts from all colon
separated groups (ex. webservers:dbservers:appservers). This is now achieved
using a typical Ambit expandable string (ex. [web,db,app]servers).

HostGroup Control

Ambit now provides simple dialogues for quickly creating, editing, listing and
deleting User and System HostGroups.

OPTION CONTROLS

Ambit also provides the ability to edit, override, list and delete options
that were previously provided with a dashed option on the command line.

SPECIAL HOSTGROUP 'down'

By default Ambit creates the System HostGroup 'down' (with a blank file
/var/ambit/hosts/down) that should be populated with any hosts either known
to be down or needing to be avoided. In order to ensure user choice Ambit
will not honor hosts in /var/ambit/hosts/down without the existence of
$HOME/.ambit/hosts/down.

NOW 100% MORE MAN

Ambit now comes with a man page in addition to the default help txt (ambit [
help | -h | --help ]) and the documentation that is being continually
updated @ http://m.a.tt/er/ambit.

A couple months back I put all my *fun* projects on hold for a day or two in
order to finally deal with something that was becoming a huge waste of time
(not to mention a pain in the ass). Of course I am referring to bathing...err
I mean, manually building and deploying packages to my environment -
specifically RPM's. I was able to work out something that tracks revision
updates from Subversion, updates the local copy for projects that are updated,
{cleans,readies} a build tree, builds an RPM and finally copies it to the
directory where some Yum automation is happening. One of the slick things I
managed to pull off was the establishment of a single RPM spec template that I
use to automatically generate spec files for all projects (8 of them at the
moment). I really like not having to deal with spec files anymore.

Anyway, the last bit of functionality that I needed to incorportate into
my SARGENT BADASS auto packaging extravaganza, was the ability to automate the
signing of all packages with GnuPG. I was able to finally work this out last
night and in celebration I am posting my key for the world to ignore:

New versions of Massh and Ambit (both completely re-designed) will be
available in the next day or two. Some of the changes have come in the
area of performance. Below is an example of Massh'in to ~200 hosts and running
uname in less than a second - 0.748s to be exact.